Fragment (25 page)

“Zero’s been out there and lived,” Pound reminded them, stubbornly. His face was slick with sweat.

“Germs aren’t the problem.”

Two giant animals with iridescent green-and-red plates rippling down their bodies exploded from the water in front of the windows. They flew up into the air in a jet of white spray that drenched the rover.

When the “mega-mantises” landed on the roof they jolted the rover forward, nosing it deeper into the black lake.

The five men heard the creatures’ legs scrambling mightily overhead as one of them fell off to the left side, hitting the mud and surging backward into the lake.

An explosive
BANG
stunned their ears. The cabin’s roof cracked with tendrils of sunlight as a shock wave shattered the overhead fluorescent light fixtures.

“That was a claw strike,” Quentin shouted, holding his head.

“We gotta get out of here!” Andy yelled.

“That thing’ll open this up like a walnut!”

Kirk climbed out of the cockpit and squeezed past the others to the rear of the rover.

He yanked open a cabinet door on the wall. Inside were four sinister long-barreled guns attached to backpacks with tubes and straps.

“We should be able to hold a circle long enough to get off a call, I think,” he told them, passing one of the weapons to Quentin.

“Flamethrowers?”
Quentin said, impressed, as he passed one along to Andy, who quickly handed it off to Pound.

Kirk nodded, handing him another. “Strap the fuel tank on your back. Tighten it with the belly strap.”

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Quentin said.

“Careful now,” Kirk said.

“Zero, will you join us?” Pound asked the cameraman. “We could use a little advice if something comes at us. You’re the only one who’s been out there.”

Zero saw the mega-mantis’s arms ratcheting for another strike on the domed window behind Pound. “Get down!” He ducked to the floor, putting his hands over the back of his head and ears.

The shock wave knocked all of the other men over. It also spread three fine cracks through the forward bubble window.

“Give me one of those, God damn it!” Zero snarled.

“Plus one of these!” Pound’s ears rang as he thrust a very NASA-looking plastic headband at Zero. “It’s a head-cam— hands free!”

Zero stared at Pound as if he’d suddenly burst into song.

“Tap the side to send video back to the lab on Channel One,” Pound told the cameraman. “We’re out of range now, but it will reach them if you can get within a mile of the lab. It holds twenty-five hours on each memory stick. That’s a viewfinder on that arm there.”

“Will it give me brain cancer?”

“Of course not!” Pound scoffed.

Zero couldn’t resist placing it around his head and swinging the viewfinder into place. He squinted into the small transparent screen that hung about two inches in front of his left eye. “OK.”

Another bone-rattling blast seemed to crack the roof. A shard of knife-edged plastic grazed Andy’s arm. He screamed as the mega-mantis on the roof tightened tendons like trebuchets inside its massive forelimbs to let loose another strike across the middle window.

The five men reeled at the shock wave. Kirk staggered to the hatch, unsealed it, and kicked it open.

The arm of a mega-mantis reached down over the hatchway, followed by a giant multicolored compound eye.

“Hit it!” Kirk screamed.

He and Zero shot thirty-foot streams of fire out the hatch, frying the eyeball that was the size of a Weber barbecue grill.

Through the forward window they could see the wounded mega-mantis lurch from the roof back into the lake, pushing the rover even deeper into the muddy bank. The middle window was now half-covered with water that churned as other creatures surfaced from the deep to tear into the injured giant.

Kirk and Zero cut the flames, and all five men jumped out onto the green shore of the boiling lake.

They smelled the treacle stench of death and sulfur in the air, and the humidity slapped a sheen of sweat on their skin immediately. The creatures wrestling in the water clacked and squeaked as they shredded the fallen mega-mantis in a feeding frenzy, turning the surface pale blue.

A shrill insect noise from the distant jungle choked the air.

The men ran in a group from the water’s edge and quickly formed a circle around Pound.

Andy was the only one without a flamethrower.

Pound fussed nervously with his satellite phone, his flame thrower slung over his shoulder by the strap.

The buttons on the phone looked like a chaos of symbols as Pound tried to sort out what he had to push and in what order. Blood trickled from one of his ears. The shellshock of the mantis strikes had fogged his brain, along with lack of sleep and a voracious fever.

The others blasted the flamethrowers to defend their circle, as more swarms emerged from the crowns of the trio of nearby trees.

Quentin dropped his flamethrower. “Cover me!” he yelled to Andy.

“Huh?”

Without replying, Quentin ran to the tallest tree on the edge of the lake and extended a stethoscope to its trunk. The roiling water turned milky blue beside him as the battle under the surface spread.

Mega-Mantis
Magnisquilla manningi
(after
Echevarria et al,
Proceedings of the
Woods Hole Scientific Meetings
, vol. 92: 61)

“What’s he doing, giving it a checkup?” Kirk yelled, stunned.

“Yeah… yeah… yeah! This thing has
hearts,”
Quentin shouted. “It’s an
animal!
I knew it had to have a vascular distribution system—”

The tree suddenly retracted into the ground. It clamped its fronds down over Quentin like an umbrella closing.

The ground quaked violently under their feet, causing Pound to punch the wrong last digit on the satphone. “God damn it!” he screeched. The rocking earth pitched him backwards. As he hit the ground, the butt of the flamethrower broke his fall and he accidentally fired a stream out its muzzle behind him—which torched the rover’s still-open hatchway.

Frothing waves splashed the lake shore near the trees, where they could still hear Quentin screaming under the tightly closed fronds.

“Quentin!” Andy shouted frantically, running toward the tree.

“Andy! Don’t!” Zero yelled.

Fronds of the other two trees leaned forward over Andy and a shimmering creature that seemed to be a larger version of a shrimpanzee descended on a bungeelike tail and snatched Andy, who screamed as it yanked him off the ground, all in a second.

The earthquake finally settled and stopped.

A wave of creatures came out of the wall of jungle a hundred yards away, and headed straight for the men.

Zero turned and ran.

Pound and Kirk ran, too.

Zero looked behind him and fired his flamethrower at a swarm of flying bugs diving down at him. “Goddamned flying piranhas,” he muttered, fending them off. As he ran ahead of the others, who followed him, gasping in panic, Zero remembered the NASA camera. He tapped the button over his right temple and flipped
the band over to see behind him. He swiveled the arm of the viewfinder forward—he had a rearview mirror.

With one eye on the viewfinder, he ran for his life, more or less following the tracks of the rover up the hillside as he faked left and right like a running back on the longest sudden death touchdown run of all time.

Otto picked up the video feed from Zero. “I got something!” On the monitor they could see Zero’s pursuers and the two other men running desperately behind him.

“Oh NO!” Nell crumpled into a chair behind Otto, staring at the screen.

Zero sprinted uphill along the tracks of the rover, toward the island’s core.

Wasps dive-bombed around him as he constantly zigzagged like Red Grange. As creatures leaped through the air at him, he dodged or slowed or sped up to avoid them.

Kirk and Pound ran behind him up the hillside. Pound was winded and staggering when five wasps hit him simultaneously. He screamed.

As their abdominal maws pierced his neck, back, and arms, the wasps injected capsules of embryos. These hatched instantly and bored their way through his flesh.

Pound dropped the flamethrower and fell writhing in agony to the ground. The twisting larvae devoured nerve after nerve. The explosions of pain sent his body into deep shock. His glasses fell off, and the world became a blur. He tried to yell for help but could not. Two drill-worms landed on his forehead, and he screamed involuntarily as they bored their abdomens through his eyelids.

In the headcam’s viewfinder, Zero saw a cloud of bugs cover Pound as the President’s envoy flailed on the slope behind him. It seemed to Zero that Pound screamed for a long time.

Kirk pumped his feet over the squishy field of green vegetation, running behind Zero, who was headed for the canyon they had originally traversed in the safety of the rover. Halfway up the clover fields, Zero continued to gain ground, but suddenly Kirk doubled over, exhausted. His head was swimming and sweat stung his eyes, as he struggled to catch his breath. The sole of his right shoe seemed to be melting.

Kirk pivoted and blasted his flamethrower blindly at the train of creatures racing up the slope behind him. Undaunted by the tongue of flame, they swirled around him in tight circles and, singed and smoking, struck into him with ravenous spikes and jaws.

Kirk screamed and spun around, staggering as he tried to pull a rat off his chest with his left hand and fire the flamethrower wildly with his right. Two Henders rats, hurtling up the slope in twenty-foot lunges under the stream of fire, clamped on to his legs. He heard two loud
pops
as their claw-strikes severed the muscles in his calves. He shrieked in pain and fell forward, his legs useless.

As a swarm of small animals overran him, he rolled onto his back and blasted his flamethrower up the slope, desperate to fry as many of Zero’s pursuers as possible.

But it was Kirk’s flesh that helped Zero more. It bought the cameraman a few precious seconds as the hungry horde behind him slowed, then doubled back to help devour the fallen driver.

Nell watched the monitor as Kirk screamed on the slope behind Zero.

She sat frozen in the chair, watching as it happened again—her nightmare coming to life on a television screen.

Otto sobbed and turned away from the monitor, retching.

“God damn it, come on, Zero!” Nell yelled, tears streaking her face as she stared at the screen. “Come on,
get out of there!”

Watching through the viewfinder, Zero blasted the flame thrower in irregular short bursts behind him, hearing Kirk’s dying scream.

He ran fast but erratically, continuously changing direction and speed to confuse the trajectories of the long-jumping predators, which continually sailed past him, missing by inches. He never stopped for more than a second.

He reached the top of the slope and the flat ravine they had driven through only a half hour earlier. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Finally on level ground, he sprinted over the rover’s tracks into the canyon.

Then, for only a heartbeat he relaxed his pace, breathing raggedly as the animals pursuing him dropped out of sight below the rise behind him. The air was fresher here and there was some relief from the heat and humidity generated by the clover. He watched the viewfinder as he jogged, relaxing his pace and sucking air into his chest. About thirty yards back, his pursuers crested the rise and poured into the canyon.

He sprinted again, zigzagging and firing the flamethrower in bursts behind him.

Three rats closed the distance in two leaps and two seconds. Zero fired a steady flame over his shoulder and fried them into flying meatballs. The sautéed rats hit the ground rolling and screaming, drawing off some of his pursuers.

He ran straight for about twenty yards, drawing a column of predators, which lunged as he turned abruptly left.

He saw a leaping rat in the viewfinder and slowed his step, catching it like a football player over his shoulder with both
hands. In the same motion he jammed its head into the maw of a cactus-barnacle-like thing sprouting out of the canyon wall beside him. The “cactus” bit the rat’s head off. Zero dropped its headless body and kept running.

Blow-dart urchins shot across the canyon on tendrils forcing him to leap, duck, and hurdle, always trying to keep his forward motion unpredictable. It was a constant struggle against the instinct to run as fast and hard as he could.

The purple bug-hives they had passed earlier lined the corridor before him.

The vampire drones began popping out of the hives. Zero ran straight at them, firing the flamethrower in front of him until it ran out of fuel.

He unstrapped the tank and flung it away, and the devouring bug clouds descended on it instantly.

Zero reached the edge of the mesa. Below was the salty pool they had passed earlier.